Month: March 2010

A class-action suit filed from Kentucky in 2004 is attracting new attention:

The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children. … "They will not be able to depose the pope," said Joseph Dellapenna, a professor at Villanova University Law School an author of "Suing Foreign Governments and their Corporations." "But lower level officials could very well be deposed and there could be subpoenas for documents as part of discovery," he said.

If the Vatican's response continues in the same vein of the last week, they have no idea what's about to hit them. Hitch wants the Pope to face charges:

This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.

Oh, wait …

Suzy Khimm gets a hold of some new guidelines that went unmentioned by Gates last week:

[T]he Pentagon now requires that "a preponderance" of evidence be provided to warrant a dismissal. Investigators can no longer use a service member's decision "not to discuss the matter" against him or her. And investigators are also now expected to consider the source of evidence against a service member and the circumstances in which it's received. For instance, a source may be considered unreliable if he or she has a "prior history of conflict" with target of the investigation or "a motive to seek revenge against or cause personal or professional harm" to the service member in question.

Basically, it seems to me that this is an attempt to reverse the way in which DADT was used in the Clinton and Bush years to intensify expulsion and persecution of gay service-members. So it's a return to the promise in 1993 that  the gay ban will slowly wither like an old chestnut on the vine, as it were. We should not mistake this for repeal but we should not mistake it for nothing either. It is a highly unsatisfying piece of Obama pragmatism. 

What it means, I suspect, is that Obama will finish his first term with the military ban in place but he will make the argument that he has made it practically obsolescent, and has persuaded the brass to stop harassment. The data will either prove or disprove that in due course, but the stigma against gay service-members will remain until it becomes utterly ridiculous.

This is not what Obama clearly promised in the campaign and since the law won't be repealed before next January, and the Congress, even on historical norms, will be more Republican, i.e. more anti-gay, after November, it will remain on the books indefinitely. 

And HRC will sell this to the gay community as yet another triumph for its 20 million member lobbying organization. Which is perhaps the only good reason to buy their civil rights doggie poop-bags.

We may have not one but two Palin reality shows coming up!:

Levi has described his idea for a show with the horrifying comparison “Jersey Shore on Ice.”  When he found out that Sarah Palin wanted to “own Alaska,” he found the idea so distasteful that he and his people decided to try to beat them to the punch.  And while many Alaskans are cringing and pulling bags over their heads at the thought of Palin “owning Alaska” they really don’t feel much better about the idea of Levi Johnston “owning Alaska.”   It’s kind of like saying, “Don’t worry, we won’t hit you on the side of the head with a 2×4…  We’ll hit you on the side of the head with a skillet!  Feel better?”

And so the rest of us sit helplessly and watch the two Wasilla Warriors duke it out for ownership in the minds of the general public.  In a state that would reach from coast to coast of the Lower 48 states, why must our two most famous spokespeople both come from the same town of 7000 people that makes the rest of the state roll its eyes.  (I’m sorry Wasilla…  You have some residents that I truly love, but you gotta know…)

Can they all just get on Judge Judy and sort it all out?

I've said it once and I'll say it again: The only person in the national media capable of really interviewing Sarah and Todd Palin is Judy Sheindlin.

The latest vile and yet surreally hilarious insight into the Islamist anti-Semitic mindset. Full details here. Yes, this is on Egyptian TV. Yes, the US gives Egypt $3 billion a year.

I confess to not watching that much cable news any more. The polarization of both MSNBC and FNC has made me feel as if I'm tuning into talk radio, not actually getting news and opinion. CNN remains by far the most balanced – but maybe the general atmosphere of cable has so alienated middle-of-the-road viewers that their position is impossible. It's like you're selling cup-cakes and safer sex advice while operating in a brothel, where your competitors get to sell Spitzer-style sessions with a Dominatrix.

And then I read Ed Morrissey and wonder if we live on the same planet:

CNN picked up Erick Erickson of Red State as an analyst, and they do better at balancing points of view in prime time than MS-NBC, which has become a lunatic asylum after about 11 am ET.  But Fox has done a better job over a longer, consistent period of incorporating serious left-of-center analysts like Juan Williams, Mara Liasson, Kirsten Powers, and more in both its talking-heads shows and its news analysis than any of the other cablers.

Fox is more ideologically balanced than CNN? Seriously?

"Right now, Sarah's trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug," – a source in the National Enquirer.

My question about a potential Palin reality-show: how will we tell the difference from, like, now?

Bernstein muses:

"[U]nity" might well be best seen in the abstract not as a potentially good strategy, but as an effect of a party that is shrinking, especially a party that is shrinking because it has become dangerously divorced from normal electoral incentives.  Is that what's actually happening to the Republicans right now?  I don't know!  I do think, however, that it's rapidly becoming probably the biggest current question worth exploring in the empirical or theoretical study of American political parties. 

The self–proclaimed Esther accuses Rozen's administration source of "slanderous attacks."

The Obama administration has their priorities exactly backwards; we should be working with our friend and democratic ally to stop Iran’s nuclear program, not throwing in the towel on sanctions while treating Israel like an enemy. In a week when events in the Holy Land thousands of years ago are on the minds of millions, we would all do well to include Israel’s security in our prayers as we encourage our government to do all it can to ensure there is never a nuclear Iran able to threaten our interests or our allies.

Steady there, NPod. Neoconservatism has a future. And it comes from Wasilla.